


like energy

by futureboy



Category: Rooster Teeth/Achievement Hunter RPF
Genre: British English, Culture, First Kiss, Game Shows, M/M, Tea, The slow mo guys, Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-31
Updated: 2018-12-31
Packaged: 2019-10-01 17:31:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,130
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17248457
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/futureboy/pseuds/futureboy
Summary: Seeing as he has to travel for work anyway, Gavin takes Michael on a trip through English culture.





	like energy

**Author's Note:**

> [RPF disclaimer: Written according to guidelines set by RT employees (to the best of my knowledge). This is a fictional series of events using characters inspired by real people.]
> 
> Moxy Früvous are pure Play Pals music and no-one can convince me otherwise.

Ever since Gavin had found out that Michael had only been to London - “like, _touristy_ London,” he’d said, with a curl in his lip, “we can’t have _that_ , Michael--”

Well, ever since then, he’d been what can only be described as Scheming.

“Michael.”

“Yeah?”

“Are you, hypothetically,” he begins, “very possibly _free_ between the seventh and the sixteenth? Next month?”

“No,” he says immediately. He blames it on the lurch in his chest when he briefly considers Gavin might have _booked them a holiday_.

“ _Michael_.”

“Alright, yeah,” Michael grins, lazily wiggling his feet against the floor from his desk chair. “How come? I thought you were booked up for filming next month?”

Gavin attempts to hide a devious smile, but it doesn’t work. “I am,” he says. “I thought that maybe… Is your passport in date?”

“Gavin--”

“It’s Slow Mo stuff,” he adds quickly, “so we could go out when the sun starts setting, if you like. And we booked more days than we needed, just in case, so I bet if it all goes to plan I’ll have tonnes of spare time. Like, a four day weekend. And the whole time I’d be housesitting for my parents, too, so we could come and go where we wanted.”

Michael can’t remember the last time he had a four day weekend. Even if it is for Gavin’s work schedule, the offer is tempting - nine days watching dumbass science experiments and drinking British booze after dark? Very, very tempting indeed.

“Will we have to sit together on the plane?” he asks, and Gavin beams, because that fucker knows he’s got ‘im.

 

* * *

 

Heathrow is  _disgusting_.

“It smells of bleach and shit down here,” Michael gripes, heaving his suitcase down a ridiculous flight of stairs. “Is this a ‘welcome home’ for you these days? Jesus.”

“Don’t be mingy, Michael,” says Gavin amiably. “It’s five in the morning, they probably just finished cleaning. That’s the smell of people working hard.”

“Yeah, working hard at covering up dookie smell,” he says, maybe more petulantly than necessary. “I’m not mingy or whatever, you said it yourself - it’s five AM and it smells of shit and you just spent the last three hours soaking my shoulder with drool.”

“I did _not!_ ” Gavin squawks.

“Did too.”

“Don’t be so _maaardy_ ,” he says, switching to a smug Northern accent, “ _durn’t be sooch a mardy buhm, Mahhh-kle_ \--”

As soon as they hit flat terminal walkway again, Michael uses his suitcase to run over Gavin’s toes.

 

* * *

 

Gavin’s parents’ house is really nice.

They’d already left that morning from Gatwick, so all Gavin has to do is swipe the keys from their hidden lockbox and let them in. The hallway is carpeted in plush cream. Michael automatically wipes his shoes and removes them.

“Where is,” Gavin begins, in a normal voice which quickly devolves into squeaking. “Where is _my little Lloyd?”_

“For God’s sake, man,” Michael says, now standing above a man and cat rolling around on the floor together.

“Look at her, Michael. She missed me!”

Gavin doesn’t sound like he’s got any intention of stopping the cooing noises, so Michael tries not to scuff the plaster as he drags his suitcase upstairs.

“I’ll pop the kettle on, boi!”

Oh, dear lord, he forgot about the idiot amount of tea he’s going to have to drink for the next week and a half.

 

* * *

 

 _“We’re on our way to some old brickworks with some_ huge _chimneys in Bedfordshire for a very special video… We don’t know what it’s gonna look like yet, but we’re gonna be blowing up stuff. As per, ey, B?”_

_“As per.”_

_“Oh, and Michael Jones is with us. Give us a little wave.”_

_“Oi, don’t give him the finger, Michael! This is for the other channel, behave yourself.”_

 

_“‘Behave yourself’ yourself.”_

 

_“How are you finding England, mate?”_

 

 _“Oh, it’s great, Dan, it’s great. I am a_ little _confused about your strips of brick houses though, what’s up with that?”_

 

_“Means they’re old, dunnit?”_

 

_“Clearly you wanna destroy one of those. Not just a brick or two.”_

 

_“I thought the red dust would be-- shut up! I thought it would look really cool as it came towards the camera. Like big powder paint.”_

_“‘Big powder paint’? Michael - can you take him back? He’s gone stupid since he was home last, look at him--”_

* * *

 

Michael stands behind cameras and the crew supplied for the shoot, and thoroughly enjoys every moment. _Especially_ when a ten foot brick wall comes out, and Dan and Gav obliterate it within thirty seconds. By the time a second wall comes out to be blown up, he’s ready to faint with sheer glee - over the hiss of spray paint, Gavin catches his eye and gives him a secret little grin.

“Dan, I just had a horrible idea,” he says, and sprays an enormous heart right over the centre of the wall.

“What?!” Dan splutters, “you can’t do that! That’s so morbid!”

“We could call this video ‘Breaking Hearts’ or sommat.”

 

* * *

 

After the shoot, Gavin talks about ‘nipping out for a quick pint’ in the car ride home. Dan declines.

Gavin then suggests that maybe they could watch ‘shite telly’ and have a night in, instead, but Michael’s already too distracted by the map he’s brought up on Google.

“ _Now_ I know where you get all your bullshit words from!” he accuses. “Toot Baldon? Hampton Gay?”

“Tiddington’s a good one,” Gav snickers.

“ _Horton-cum-Studley?!_ ” Michael screeches, and Dan has to hold onto the bar above his seat to keep from folding in half. “That can’t be a real place! You can’t be serious right now! I wanna go home, man.”

No-one notices his slip-up. Michael doesn’t even notice until he and Gavin are dropped off at Gavin’s parents’ house, because it sounded like he wanted to go back to America, and that maybe his home was Austin.

He spares a glance for Gavin hurrying through feeding the cat and swearing at the tin opener.

He wishes he hadn’t noticed.

 

* * *

 

“The bar scene is totally different here.”

“You wouldn’t have gotten _this_ in tourist-shite London,” Gavin nods sagely, “and you can’t call it a _bar scene_ , Michael, that’s too American. It’s just going down the local.”

“The local?”

“Your local pub. Or drinking spot. Wherever people hang out.”

Being a regular drinker at a place in England seems like it holds far less stigma than in America. If you recognise other regulars, it doesn’t make you a boozer, it just means you’re integrated with small town or village life. To Michael, it feels a little like pubs are specifically designed to emulate getting drunk on Christmas Day in the living room.

They’re even sat on a ‘sofa’ in the corner. The pub has _carpet_.

Plus, it’s a hundred _million_ times easier to strike up a conversation with people than in the US.

“Y’aright?”

Michael panics, because he’s just gone up to the bar to order another round, and the man on the stool next to him is a complete stranger. It’s only when he remembers the rules, that asking someone any variation of ‘how are you’ is just a greeting in England, that he can respond in turn.

“Alright,” he says easily, and turns back to the bar.

But then the bloke says something along the lines of ‘sahhhnd, made oop abaht this new ahpiay, like,’ and Michael blanches. Woah, there. Not a language he understands.

Thankfully, at that moment, Gavin chooses to slide across the bar between the two.

“Cheers, boi,” he says to Michael, and then, nodding at the older man, “y’alright, Bobbie?”

“Sahnd, fella, now they shifted that jarg bitter,” the man concludes.

Gav pays for their drinks, easy as he likes. “Good to see you, mate,” he grins, and gestures for Michael to follow back to their sofa.

“Go ‘ead, Gavin,” the man says, by way of farewell, and Michael leaves _far_ more bewildered than he was before he went up.

“What the hell was that?”

“Oh, that’s Bobbie, he’s from Liverpool,” Gavin grins, sitting down heavily on the sofa cushions.

Michael blinks. He's befuddled by the whole thing. “People _speak_ like that?”

“Yeah, he’s a Scouser. ‘Sound’ is good, he was well happy because they replaced one of the beers on tap.”

“That’s insane,” Michael says. It refers to many things about the exchange - the fact that Scouse dialect exists, the fact that he just met someone new who spoke his language in an incomprehensible way, the fact that Gavin was so familiar that he didn’t even have to think about translating it.

“You weapon,” Gavin mumbles. It sounds vaguely like an insult, but not really.

 

* * *

 

Before Dan comes to pick them up in the morning, Gavin likes to loudly shower and cook ‘a decent brekkie’ for them. He punctuates this with CDs left over from his childhood. The one Michael hates the most, or at least before nine in the morning, is a nonsensical, satirical acapella group from the nineties, the lyrics filled with Gavin-esque syllables.

He’s played that one for the last two of the four days they’ve been in the UK.

Luckily, Dan gets there this morning before Gavin can either play that _one_ album Michael hates, or a _different_ shitty album for Michael to swallow down. Michael’s never been so happy to be in the passenger seat.

There’s hot tea and little cupcakes at the wrap for the last Slow Mo Guys shoot - they spent a few days in Dan’s back garden filming more simple experiments, but the period’s been bookended by the Brick Shoot and this whole-day Det. Cord Shoot.

“I never realised the scope of, like, how much you destroy,” he says.

“I don’t destroy,” says Gavin grandly, “I don’t create _or_ destroy. I just change. Like energy.”

“Yeah, change into _dust_ ,” Michael points out, but the foam cup of tea is warm in his hands where he smiles into it. “You all good to go for the next part?”

“Yeah,” says Gav, “but I want one of them little cakes first. With the hundred and thousands on.”

“I was gonna bring you one until you said _that_. What the fuck is a hundred and thousand?”

Gavin rubs his thumb and forefinger together, right in front of a squinted eye: “a little sprinkle, Michael.”

“I’m not your butler,” he grumbles, and goes to get one anyway. A two minute call sounds - the shoot is going to be restarting in a second.

“You can call me ‘Your Maj’!” Gavin yells after him gleefully.

Michael edges his way past the graduate camera operating people and crew and whatever. He just wants to grab some fucking cake. “‘Scuse me, ‘scuse me...”

“Hey, man, what do you do?” asks one of them conversationally.

There’s some iced cakes with pink and purple squiggles on them. Michael smirks to himself and snags two of them.

“Uh… I’m moral support.”

 

* * *

 

All of the pubs are on the same road. It doesn’t make any sense.

“They’re all on the same road! There’s like six of them, Gavin.”

“Well, obviously,” Gavin had said, “that makes for a _great_ pub crawl. Otherwise by the fourth or fifth, you’re stumbling around in the road and everyone hates walking long distances. You have to start at the furthest and work your way in--”

And that’s how Michael found himself stumbling down a too-wide High Street in Oxford, occasionally bumping into Gavin as the two of them talked about everything and nothing.

“They’ve all got such weird names.”

“Oh, they’re easy to figure out, though,” Gavin babbles nonsensically, “ _White Hart_ and _Red Lion_ and _The Crown_ and stuff, they’re all royal and old. If it mentions a dog then it’s probably about hunting. Ones with numbered objects in usually mean a company’s men drank there or sommat, same with _Arms_ pubs.”

“Damn,” says Michael, wetting his lips, “you’re up to speed on your pub names, huh?”

Gavin shrugs. “Just interesting, innit?”

“You know a lot about a lot of stuff,” Michael insists. It’s his favourite thing about Gavin, that he can spout off random facts like snapshots. “Hey, look, _Old Nag’s Head_. That’s you, that is.”

“That’s a horse, a nag is!” Gavin wheezes. “I can’t believe you called me an _Old Nag_. That’s so horrible.”

It’s because Michael’s picked up way more about British stuff than he thought he would - particularly with regards to ‘insults’ and ‘affection’ and how they tie together. Calling Gavin an ‘old nag’ is like Gavin calling him a ‘mardy bum’ and a ‘weapon’, or any combination of English dialect words he doesn’t fully understand. It’s the same as ‘boi’.

Gavin’s polite as anyone when he’s talking with strangers - words like ‘mate’ roll off him normally. ‘Boi’ is informal. It’s close. He wouldn’t call a stranger a ‘weapon’ and Michael would bet anything.

He wants to go into another pub with Gavin.

The man in question points at a sign for a nearby hotel, lurching slightly. “ _Spread Eagle_ ,” he grins.

“Hm,” says Michael, “I _guess_ we could work on that later.”

 

* * *

 

 

He’s having to re-evaluate a hell of a lot of things right now. Michael supposes that culture shock’ll do that to ya.

It’s in the way that Gavin brings a hot mug of tea to him in the morning before the central heating’s kicked in, balancing it on the table next to the pull-out sofa Michael’s been crashing on. Maybe it’s a uniquely English thing to creep in and leave it on the side, without saying a single word, but it feels almost tenderly embarrassed.

Or it could be in the way Michael’s contributed absolutely nothing to this trip work-wise. That Gavin just wanted him to come along for the ride.

Even now, as he’s waiting in the 90s-style kitchen for Gavin to get up, sipping from his mug against the cool counters, he thinks of Austin. How every Play Pals video delays his journey home at the end of the day, but how he never wants to leave. And that when he listens to even-slightly-sad love songs, he sometimes gets this hollow ache of want in his lungs that he can’t breathe away into nothingness.

“Morning, Michael,” Gavin grins, whirlwinding himself into the cramped room. He opens the fridge with the crack of a broken seal. “I’m in the mood for a bacon sarnie... Want me to make two?”

 

* * *

 

They go window shopping and on a walk to see a windmill and Christ, Gavin lives near some beautiful scenery.

“Sorry that I haven’t really got anything interesting planned,” he apologises sheepishly.

Michael doesn’t know how to convey that it’s nice to simply _exist_ with Gavin’s company in a new environment, so instead, he says: “that’s okay. Britain’s hardly an adrenaline junkie hotspot.”

They leave in two days. Gavin decides that this is the perfect opportunity for a night in, and they make puttanesca with garlic bread with minimal mess. Michael lounges on the plush floral sofa in the front room afterwards, enjoying the blasts of heat coming from the fake fire.

“This is a movie round, but I don’t know any off the top of my head,” he calls into the kitchen.

“I can’t hear it from in there, hang on.”

Gavin speed-walks carefully into the living room, plonks two mugs of tea on the coffee table, and lets his sock-clad feet join them.

“Get your fuckin’ feet down, you’re an animal.”

“My house, my rules,” Gavin says, replacing his stuck-out tongue with his infuriating smug face.

“This is your parents’ house! Treat it with some respect, man!”

“Too late, can’t move, cat’s on me. Aw, look at my _little Lloyd Bor, yes you_ are! I’m so hch-cha-chuch-ng ahhh.”

“Speak English,” Michael admonishes him. On the TV, Ben from Lincoln guesses the most obvious answer on the board. “Come on, man, everyone knows _Singin’ in the Rain_.”

The co-hosts are two Very Proper English Men. One of them is the smart one and one of them is the funny one, presumably, but both of them seem _real_ smart and collected. Except when they go off on weird knowledge tangents, but that’s fairly minimal.

Even the idiocy is treated with respect. Where the presenter chuckles to himself politely, Gavin takes Gary from Brighton’s incorrect answer as a personal affront. “ _Gazza!_ ” he screeches, sitting up. Lloyd, startled by the outburst, bounds across the room to sit by the fire. “ _Tobacco Gang_ ?! It gives you the initials of the film _and_ a clue. How could you _not_ guess _The Godfather?”_

“I love you,” Michael smiles.

“Tell me you would’ve gotten _The Godfather_ , Michael. I need to know I can trust you.”

“‘Course you can trust me, you mardy bum,” he mutters.

Gavin turns a wicked little grin onto him, full force. “You’re not using that right,” he says, sounding delighted, and proceeds to drape himself all over Michael’s lap.

“C’mere.”

“You sure you don’t wanna watch _Pointless_?”

“Your game shows are so slow,” Michael whines, “and the tea’s too hot to drink right now. So c’mere.”

There’s a satiny slipping sound as Gavin’s socks scrabble across the sofa cushion, and he’s trapped against the warm space between the seat and the back. “You alright with this?” he says, scruff scratching against Michael’s cheek.

“If I wasn’t alright with it,” Michael says, “I wouldn’t have come, moron.”

Gavin’s never looked so delighted to be labelled with pejoratives, except for when he doesn’t, because at that moment he presses his mouth firmly against Michael’s and causes the man’s eyes to flutter shut in surprise. Kissing Gavin should probably feel _bigger_ than this, but in actuality, it just feels private and sweet and warm.

Lloyd meows in alarm. It’s a strangled sound, like a creaky garden gate. Even the Free family’s cat sounds homely.

“Aw, man, we are missing some killer trivia from Richard Osman right now.”

“Fuck the trivia,” says Gavin unexpectedly. Michael laughs and laughs and pulls the man down onto him properly.

They’ve got a whole day after this, too. Awesome.

 

* * *

 

 _Back soon,_ he thinks. _Huh. I wonder if anything’s happened on Twitter since the plane took off._

They’re about three hours into the flight. Michael’s listening to that stupid band that Gavin loves listening to in the mornings, except that he finds they’re really tolerable and funny after eleven AM or so. Against his shoulder, Gavin’s dumb idiot snoring head is lolling around.

He holds his cell phone out and takes a picture.

“Photo evidence,” he mumbles, typing out a caption to use on Instagram later. “You should be thanking me for allowing you to drool, you wet freak.”

The clouds outside are white and fluffy, like the dust of a slow motion explosion.

They’re almost home. Michael orders a breakfast tea from one of the stewards.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm on [pillowfort](http://pillowfort.io/futureboy) and tumblr - come say hi!
> 
> Kudoses, commentses, and subs are always welcomed. Thanks for reading ♥


End file.
